Comprehensive external/internal network penetration test,

Comprehensive external/internal network penetration test, cloud infrastructure review, and vulnerability assessment for a production hosting ecosystem.

The Objective: A production hosting provider required a full-scope security audit to evaluate their perimeter defense, verify compliance with the CIS Benchmarks and OWASP Top 10 for Cloud, and uncover critical misconfigurations before public deployment.

The Approach: I executed a hybrid security assessment combining automated infrastructure reconnaissance with deep manual configuration checks. Every vulnerability was manually validated using tools like Nmap, Wireshark, and CloudBrute to eliminate false positives and scored using standard CVSS 3.1 metrics.

From a single comprehensive audit, I uncovered 31 reproducible findings:

3 High Severity: Exposed database backups publicly accessible via misconfigured AWS S3 buckets, and unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) vectors on perimeter network appliances.

6 Medium Severity: Overly permissive IAM policies granting excessive root privileges, missing multi-factor authentication (MFA) enforcement on management panels, and outdated SSH protocol versions in use.

10 Low Severity: Unrestricted directory listings on internal staging servers, insecure network daemon configurations, and loose firewall rules permitting unnecessary inbound traffic.

12 Informational: Internal IP address disclosures in HTTP response headers, missing asset tagging, and verbose system version banners.